Design, deconstruction, and development details of our indie RPG!

Help Wanted

Pixel artists! I need your help for drawing GUI elements or battle effects for Dreamblazers, a 16-bit style commercial RPG. :D These are both paid positions just like the already-filled tileset, character sprite, and monster sprite positions. =)

This is a long-term project that I personally anticipate finishing in mid-2018, but since a large majority of indie developers who I’ve supported have difficulty with time estimates and I don’t want to assume I’m any different, please be prepared to carry on longer before applying. I’d also like to have enough assets for a basic initial demo by late 2016, which at this time means the GUI element artist is most important.

Years of experience are welcome but not necessary; what is necessary is a love and passion for what you’re doing. Far be it from me to create a game named Dreamblazers and then bring anyone onto the team who doesn’t truly love drawing pixel art!

Links to some of your previous work, whether commercial or hobby, are very appreciated. (And by that I mean necessary!) On the flip side, if you’d like a referral letter about me as a client, then please feel free to ask; my character designer Flora graciously offered me that opportunity. =)

So if you’ve checked out my project details here and feel like you’d have fun working on this game, please consider reaching out to me! Hit me up on Twitter, leave a comment here (they’ll need to be approved, so no worries if they don’t show immediately), or send an email to helpwanted at—well, at this site’s domain name. (I’ll reply from a different email, though; helpwanted is only a temporary email to dodge spambots until all positions are filled.)

If you need more info, then the rest of this post is dedicated to details on what the needed pixel art assets entail:

GUI Elements

Fun and eye-catching menu skins and health bars are what I’m after—a GUI that fits with the color and whimsy of these dialogue portraits! Examples of what I’m talking about:

These would be a very big help so I can stop looking at my current placeholder menus and show off a lot of the things I talk about on the main Dreamblazers page like the fashionably fun equipment system, finely-balanced abilities, and so on. =)

Getting these GUI elements is also vital since they’ll help me get better perspective on how much room I have for equipment icons and battle icons; the reason those icons aren’t on my list of needs yet isn’t that I don’t need them, but that I don’t know my size requirements yet in the context of real menu frames.

Battle Effects

I’m talking about healing magic, sword slashes, beams of light, Dragonball-style character teleportation—the works! In this case, the main inspirations I’m looking for are Pokémon, Secret of Mana, Lufia II, and a dash of Final Fantasy VI. It’s a bit difficult to explain and also difficult to find well-organized sprite sheets for these games that I can post here, so just contact me for more details.

I can at least say this much: similar to Pokémon, I have dozens and dozens of attacks in Dreamblazers, so for the most part there will be a lot of “generic” effects that can be applied to multiple attacks. For example, a “crushing strike” animation would be used for Backhand Swing, Crushing Punch, Diving Crush, Double Smash, Kick in the Face, Mighty Charge, Noble Hammer, Run Down, Smash Takedown, Spin Attack, Super Tackle, Tackle, Wallop, Wild Charge, and Wild Thrash.

I glanced through the 175 moves currently in the game and here’s a list of the animations I should need based on that:

I don’t foresee any of the attacks that aren’t in the game yet needing additional animations—at least not at this time. A few of the strongest attacks in the game that show up very late will get their own animation, but there aren’t many of them since they’ll be huge ultra attacks that are only used by one or two characters each. In any case, because they’re reserved for late in the game, I won’t need them right now.

2 thoughts on “Help Wanted”

I’m an indie dev, thinking of hiring the artist Lyn/Floradrawz for some visual-novel-style sprites. Her portfolio says she is working on your project. Is this quote she listed accurate?

“Thank you as always for your *awesome*. … Two indie RPG developers who I’ve been following were talking recently about having real difficulty with finding reliable people as 3D modelers, composers, and pixel artists have either flaked out on them or just not delivered what they said they would… So I wanted to say I’m really grateful for you because you’ve been that reliable for me. ”